Thursday, 13 May 2010

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Unflinching Eye is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...

Sweet little Linda Blair was only 14-years-old when she portrayed Regan Teresa MacNeil in The Exorcist. My niece is 14 this year too. She's into fashion and stuff, and I'm pretty sure she dreams of gracing the cover of some stylish magazine someday. However, I know for a fact that she would NOT want to be portrayed on said magazine cover thusly:

That can't have been easy on the fragile psyche of a young girl at precisely the age when her self-image starts to mean everything. Then there's this:

I'm no expert on adolescent psychology, but I doubt that this image of a BARF BAG had a nurturing effect on Linda's early sexual development. It's not really a stretch to imagine that she'd want to alter her perceived public image to be seen as anything but a puking, obscenely blasphemous, vag-stabbing demon. So, maybe that desire to leave behind her image of Pazuzu-Vessel led her to over-compensate a little in her future choice of magazine covers...

...just sayin'.

To celebrate the end of Blair Week, I give you Redd Kross' first album from 1982 (as Red Cross), appropriately titled Born Innocent. According to legend (Wikipedia), in 1980 Red Cross came up with their name based on the crucifix-masturbation scene from The Exorcist. Makes sense, because the song "Linda Blair" drops references to about half the movies covered this past week by my fellow Blair Week contributors. The McDonald brothers were obviously fans:

In the Exorcist, babyYou were really insane You got busted, you got dustedYou got busted for cocaine You're born innocent, girl And that ain't all You got it for the first time baby In a shower stall

Kidnapped, raped and possessed Linda is the Best She used to be on the run But now she thinks it's a lot of fun She takes her cigarettes from her sleeve Now she never wants to leave Not even when she's eighteen

Liiiiiiiiiiinda, Liiiiiiiiiiinda, Liiiiiiiiiiinda, Liiiiiiiiiiinda

Finally, a 1968 ad for the same Parker Brothers Ouija Board that Regan uses:

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

Just a few weeks ago when I was writing my post on Andrei Bouzikov, I was wondering how old Frazetta was and how long he had to go in this world. Now - unfortunately - I know.

At the end of the '70s, when Frazetta was at his most popular, I was at just the right age to fall in love with his work. I was reading Robert E. Howard's Conan books, was obsessed with Tolkien and loved Ralph Bakshi's Wizards and Rings. Milius' Conan The Barbarian and the Bakshi/Frazetta collaboration Fire And Ice were just about to hit. And when I say "fall in love" with his work I mean it literally. Those curvaceous slave girls, warrior princesses and necromantic witches made quite an impression on my randy adolescent psyche. Boobies!

The Death Dealer has come, and taken one of the great fantasy visionaries with him. Frank, may you ever sit at the right hand of Crom.

Saturday, 8 May 2010

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

Reading those words in 1985, I had no idea how prophetic they would become. William Gibson's Neuromancer was a life changing novel for me, opening my world to a whole universe of ideas about the potential of computers and the power of information; our relationship with (and addiction to) technology; and very plausible speculation about a future of post-human evolution through neural augmentation. It isn't hard now to imagine us becoming so immersed in our tech that it becomes an extension of ourselves. I'm already completely dependent on my computer for access to music, movies, comics, news, communication, creativity, stimulation, relaxation.

Last night Fangoria reported that the reigns of the floundering Neuromancer adaption have been handed over to one of the most visionary and intelligent film-makers working today - Vincenzo Natali. This is very exciting news, and if you have any doubt about his suitability for the project, check out his cult cyberpunk sleeper Cypher.

I'd all but lost hope for a good Neuromancer film, because last year the direction it was heading in was looking very, very dire. Some complete hack of a director attached; that no-talent nancy-boy from the Star Wars prequels cast as Case and some pre-production art that made it look like some kind of horrible steampunk abortion. Uuuuurrgh.

The question is: can Neuromancer still be relevant in a world where Gibson's ideas have been so ruthlessly pillaged by every facet of our culture for 25 years (technology, design, philosophy, fashion, movies like The Matrix, eXistenZ, Sleep Dealer, Ghost In The Shell, etc)? In a world where so many of his once fantastic concepts have more or less passed into the realm of the banal? A world where the legacy of the great cyberpunk writers - Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, Jack Womack, Neal Stephenson and their progenitors PKD, Alfred Bester, Ballard and Burroughs - is sullied by those shamefully idiotic steampunk ninnies? Not to mention the whole cyberpunk "sub-culture", which has always been a pathetically sad affair (art is art, why do people need to pretend it's real?).

With Natali at the helm (and rewriting the screenplay), I think Neuromancer could be subtly tweaked into something that is once again cutting edge SF. Last year's brilliant Mexican indie Sleep Dealer, Duncan Jones' upcoming Source Code and this year's mega budgeted Inception prove that we're still fascinated with the concepts that lie at the heart of cyberpunk. After all, although much of Gibson's Sprawl series is now hopelessly dated, the essence of it still looks like a future that we're moving towards (corporate supremacy, sensory immersion in technology, physical/neural modification, AI, over-population, environmental disaster - dystopia).

But where does all this leave Natali's long mooted adaption of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise?